An Aussie Having Me On

Katy (killerbunny600) is regaling me with tales of Drop Bears and Hoop Snakes, dangerous animals of the Australian Bush.

Drop bears have these really sharp fangs and hang around in trees to drop on top of your head when you walk underneath. Hoop Snakes don’t seem quite so bad as the worse thing with them is they bite their own tail, forming a hoop, so they can be rolled around for hours of entertainment.

Oh, okay, I get it. Turns out that in point of fact these beasts are actually of the mythical variety — danger averted.

In other local news… voting in this (otherwise) fine country is actually required and you will be fined if you do not. Wow. We now return you to your regularly scheduled SEO content.

Extortion SEO – Take 2

Do a search for cydcor.  This is a company that employs a large face-to-face sales force so it naturally gets a high profile in the public because of contact with potential customers and employees alike so sure enough there are complaints.  But look closely.  They are from 2002 and 2004!

And yet, these old, unverifiable complaints from a site with no discernible editorial policy outranks:

A Cydcor Client Story at Reuters
Cydcor Opportunity Page at Monster
Cydcor Company Overview at Hoover’s
Cydcor’s LinkedIn Profile
Cydcor News at eMediaWire
More Cydcor News at PRWeb
Cydcor Investment Overview at BusinessWeek

How?  A variation of the Google Bomb!  But instead of the company website, it is the search result page itself that gets hijacked.  With just 25,000 results for Cydcor, it takes only a very few negative comments in these large complaint sites to rank right along side the company name for these navigational queries.

Welcome to the tyranny that is lawless democracy.

Extortion SEO

It was just a matter of time until the so-called "democratic nature of the web" developed precisely the same problems that caused our founding fathers to eliminate democracy as a viable form of government for these United States.  Specifically, the tyranny of majority.

What they knew, and we have forgotten, is that the majority never need protection, even from oppressive government.  It is the minority that law protects.

How does this relate to SEO you may ask?  The "wisdom of the crowds" gone terribly wrong.

Imagine a site where people can complain about companies anonymously in an environment with no editorial review.  Since complainers generally have lots of free time on their hands, such a site will rapidly grow to enormous size and naturally rank for most company names with little or no effort.

Welcome to ripoffreport.  Examples next.

Brave New World

Quoting MSNBC’s Countdown, the 1936 Socialist Party platform is now, 60 years later, the law of the land. Hmmm, progress?
Not hardly. Take a look at the 2000 and (brand new) 2004 red/blue presidential election map and notice:

  1. the country is predominately "conservative" — whatever the hell that has come to mean; and
  2. the conservative/liberal split is uniformally a division of urban and non-urban populations.

What we are witnessing is the crest in a multi-generational wave of social "reform" that dates to a time prior to the so-called new deal. The near future will be characterized by later historians as a time of slowing down and rolling back programs that embody the socialist doctrines and returning instead to the classical solutions that created these States united in America.